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\[01:13:53.09\] And then there'd be all sorts of gamification that happened. I had a teammate who was like "Why am I always the conductor every time I want to roll out a change to the monolith?" And it's like "Well, because everyone was hanging back, waiting for someone to take that role, and then you jumped on, and yo... |
And, then I started hearing from people too, like "Well, I won't even try to deploy something after lunch, because if I ended up being responsible for that - who knows? I'm gonna be stuck till after dinner, waiting around... So I'm just gonna wait till tomorrow." And so you can see the sort of like aggregation of frict... |
In DevSat - I mentioned the satisfaction survey - deployment came out as the highest friction. And then like all these other side effects that affect code health, like people writing bigger changes, code review becoming more difficult, changes being deployed become more risky... So an increasingly problematic situation... |
And then - and this is a situation that happens at a lot of startups, too. github.com isn't the only deploy target for GitHub. There's GitHub Enterprise Server, which is an enterprise-focused product, where customers deploy GitHub Enterprise Server on-prem. And for them to do upgrades, they require downtime, right? And... |
Also, most of the GitHub engineering teams were really focused on .com. So "I got my feature out to .com. I'm done. The ops team can deal with whatever." So then this poor ops team is managing the upgrades for Apple, and IBM, and all these big customers, but also lots of small customers... Debugging becomes more diffic... |
And then the third piece to the deployment puzzle at GitHub, which was really enough to say "Stop. We've gotta really invest in how we do deployment" was on-prem enterprise product is not the state of the art; it's not where most companies want to be, and so GitHub really had to develop a cloud SaaS offering for enterp... |
There was lots of pressure from leadership to get this product out the door quickly, and so GitHub did try to take shortcuts, tried various strategies to replay changes from .com to the cloud, and never could work, never could scale. Especially the frequency and unpredictability of the time required for database change... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What an issue there... That sounds like a big headache, basically. |
**Rachel Potvin:** \[01:17:48.25\] But it's funny, because I've talked to multiple startups who are in this situation as well, where they had maybe a community product, maybe an open source product where deployment is a little bit more straightforward, and then now they have an enterprise-specific product... And in mos... |
And you know, historically, the deployment process at GitHub and at many, many startups just depends on so much information in humans' heads, right? Like "I made this destructive database change, and I know I can't make the associated code change until the backfill has finished... And - oh, see that that backfill has f... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that the state of deployment right now, -ish? |
**Rachel Potvin:** No... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So has a lot of this been solved then? |
**Rachel Potvin:** GitHub is doing really good work. I would say it isn't in good progress, but it took -- this is one of those things where like "Oh, maybe thousand-plus person scale..." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Rachel Potvin:** ...where you had to say, "Look, we can't do this quickly." There was efforts to say, "Quick, get this thing out the door", and it was an example where it didn't work. I'll tell you, other sort of factors that happened were like -- this is obviously an Azure cloud-based offering. You know, "We're just... |
GitHub is doing really good work right now in this, and part of the key was a bunch of different strategies were tried using checkpoints... And you know, this is obviously something that - it's a culture thing, too. I'm gonna say that every time, because -- and one thing we didn't talk about today, which we could talk ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure. For sure. Well, a lot could be said, as you said just now, and we may have to do another podcast with you on more topics... Or have you back next year, or more frequently, now that we've had you on at least once. It has been great hearing all the behind-the-scenes and all the challenges th... |
\[01:21:58.15\] And now you're on the next hierarchy of your career, advising, and doing fun things... I've gotta imagine that you have people reaching out, or there's a way for folks to reach out. Is that something you're advertising? And if so, feel free to advertise. |
**Rachel Potvin:** Oh, thanks. Yeah, I'm still figuring out what's next for me, but I'm really enjoying getting to talk to a lot of different startups, and setting up some advisory roles, which has been really fulfilling. I will say, there's one startup I'm working with that I just adore called EngFlow, and I've been a... |
But yeah, I'm really focused on developer and data productivity; those are passion areas for me, and I really feel like there's a lot of exciting, important work happening in that space... So the companies I've been talking to are mostly in that space. And I do think I have some good insight in this 100-person-plus sca... |
And I'm enjoying my life quite a lot right now. I realized -- I may have said to you, Adam, I felt like I've been grinding for 25 years, and I realized, "Gosh, I had never been away for more than one night with my husband since my 10-year-old was born." And that's embarrassing. \[laughs\] And so we're fixing that, and ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes... |
**Rachel Potvin:** Yeah. It's been really good. And so I'm definitely on a journey, living my one life, and trying to be happy, and still figuring out what's next. So please do reach out to me if you want to talk. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go. Well, Rachel, it's been an absolute pleasure hearing about your journey, and all the things you've learned, all the things you put into place as a leader, and we look forward to getting you back one day, someday soon maybe, for more. So thank you so much, Rachel. It's been awesome. |
**Rachel Potvin:** Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate you both. Thank you. |
• Introduction to Bridget Murtaugh, Product Manager on the Visual Studio Code team at Microsoft |
• Discussion of development containers and the dev container spec |
• Background on how the host's team got involved with dev containers |
• Introduction to containers.dev and the dev container spec |
• Explanation of what dev containers are and how they work |
• Overview of the dev container spec and its features |
• Benefits of using Dev Containers for development environments |
• Dev Containers can standardize tools and languages for development, testing, and production |
• Importance of consistency in development environments |
• Challenges of managing different environments for development and production |
• Dev Containers can simplify setup and reduce worries about complexity |
• Use of Dev Containers in combination with GitHub Codespaces and Docker |
• Contributions to open source projects, including using Dev Containers for development environments |
• Resistance to cloud-based dev environments |
• Benefits of dev containers, such as repeatability and infrastructure as code |
• Concerns about layers and Docker performance |
• Importance of user experience in development |
• Potential for dev containers to be a "silver bullet" solution |
• Collaboration between teams to fit technology to user needs |
• User feedback and experience with dev containers in VS Code |
• Origins of VS Code and its development as a remote development tool |
• Evolution of VS Code from a text editor to a more feature-rich tool |
• Relationship between VS Code and Visual Studio |
• Future of VS Code: remaining a text editor or becoming an IDE |
• VS Code's core identity and goals as a development tool |
• Remote development experiences and growth of VS Code features |
• Discussion of VS Code's approach to modern development and extensions |
• Importance of keeping VS Code lightweight and avoiding it becoming a full-fledged IDE |
• Development of the "code anywhere" concept and its application in VS Code |
• Background on the development of dev containers and its potential to be a standard for other tools and platforms |
• Efforts to make dev containers a general concept that can be adopted by other tools and platforms, rather than a proprietary format |
• Open development of the dev container spec and its potential to enable interoperation with other container orchestration formats |
• Customization and extensibility of dev containers through the use of JSON files and tool-specific properties. |
• Discussion of the benefits of using dev containers and Codespaces for development |
• Ability to quickly launch and edit code in a container with minimal setup |
• Importance of dev containers for open-source contributions and polyglot development |
• Clarification of the relationship between the dev container spec and Codespaces |
• Explanation of the dev container spec and its core components |
• Introduction to the dev container CLI and its role in implementing the spec |
• Discussion of building custom tools that support dev containers using the CLI |
• Brief mention of a sponsor, Square, and their platform for commerce development |
• Managing and curating inventory |
• Organizing customers |
• Managing employees |
• Extending Square gift cards to apps |
• Using Afterpay |
• Square APIs and SDKs for building business apps |
• Square Solutions partner benefits |
• VS Code experience with dev containers |
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